Crime, Result of Bad Governance – Emenike

Kidnapping and other violent crimes bedevilling parts of the country are results of  bad governance and failure of leadership, Chief Ikechi Emenike has said.

  Emenike, a Journalist and an Economist, attributed most of the problems plaguing the country in general and many states in particular to the philosophy that government has no business in business, pointing out that if the leaders have been concerned with establishing institutions that generate jobs only few natural criminals would have been operating and the Police would not have problems contending with them

  He argued that for the Third World countries, government should have business in business, asserting that economic activities would not thrive without government support.

   ”In a society where there is near full employment, you won’t find some of these crimes. Most of the kidnappers do not have jobs,” he said, adding that “Government is the last guarantor of employment. When you have a government, from the beginning of the year to the end, that cannot, in good conscience, point to one job and say we created these number of jobs, it means something is wrong with that society.”

  The Abia PDP stalwart who contested for the governorship seat of the state in 2007 on the platform of All Nigerian Peoples Party (ANPP) and is now back to PDP, said in an interaction with newsmen in his Umukabia Ohuhu country home in Umuahia North Local Government Area that leaders at all levels should build blocks of development by establishing economic ventures to enhance revenue generation to be able to reverse the rot in society.

  Responding to a question on kidnapping and its consequences, Emenike said “kidnapping and economic problems have been long in coming. They all flow from bad governance, they all flow from failure of leadership.”

  “Without building blocks of development, without establishing economic structures and institutions, there will never be development and when you do not do it, society has a way of degenerating. Degeneration leads to a couple of things in society, including crimes and recession,

  “Quite frankly, much of what we see are symptoms of bad governance, bad leadership and not doing what is right as at when it should be done and it is a collective thing, involving the leaders and the led,” he added.

  The Publisher of the World Bank/IMF Annual General Meeting, who said that he may not run for an election in 2011 if he is not persuaded by the outcome of his current consultations, noted that it was the duty of all and sundry to enthrone good governance which he said would provide solution to the problems bedevilling society.

  He said governments in other lands use budgets to create jobs while in Nigeria, most states of the country wait just to collect and share federal allocations at the end of every month. “This is not governance. If you are very diplomatic, you will discover that that is very crude and primitive way of applying resources. Government should be able to get money from different resources and should also be in a position to add value to those resources for the benefit of the people,” he said.

  He said both the states and local governments should pull their resources together and establish financial institutions such as banks and insurance firms which he identified as drivers of building blocks, adding that what the country’s financial system needed was deepening controls of that sector.